NFL looks for change to stop eroding TV ratings

Now that the presidential campaign is over, perhaps the healing can begin for National Football League television ratings.

The league's bruised and battered numbers are down but far from out.

Election-year dips in NFL ratings aren't unusual, and President-elect Donald Trump's race against Hillary Clinton was a particularly potent draw. Cable news viewership surged opposite football, not to mention the league had to go head to head with two presidential debates.

But with ratings dramatically down overall year to year, and the NFL's prime-time showcases especially hard hit, there are concerns this may be symptomatic of something more lasting and impactful.

To the extent that poor matchups have posed a problem, the decision to schedule half the 2-6 Bears' first eight games in prime time surely didn't help.

At one New York confab in recent days, NFL Media's executive vice president conceded the ratings woes probably weren't strictly election-related.

If the Cubs have done nothing else, they have managed to return the national pastime to the nation, their saga of...

At another, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called the declines "a reflection of multiple issues," not one in particular, and said the league is trying to identify and combat them.

Both allowed there may be changes in the offing to reassert pro football's hold on America.

"We don't dismiss any particular theory," Goodell said Thursday at the New York Times' annual Dealbook conference. "We run them all down. We work at it."

Up to now, the NFL has seemed largely immune to the audience erosion.

It has been a dependable throwback, a top weekly draw watched live with the ads and network promos intact. Its trends run counter to the industry as a whole.

That's why ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS agreed to spend, on average collectively, about $5 billion annually through 2021 for the rights to NFL games.

The Cubs have never played in a televised World Series, but they're getting the hang of it with Cleveland.

They kept their championship hopes alive with a 3-2 Game 5 victory Sunday at Wrigley Field, and trounced the NFL's "Sunday Night Football" in doing so.

Over their first five games nationally,...

Sponsors, network executives and Wall Street analysts aren't entirely sure what to make of the ratings drop yet. None is eager to find out what happens if the hemorrhaging becomes the new normal.

The presidential campaign emerged as an early scapegoat this season, but there have been so many other potential factors floated to explain away the declines that one might fairly wonder why anyone watches NFL games anymore.

For starters, there are too many games on TV, too many mismatches, too many blown officiating calls.

The pace of the games is too slow. There's this thing called streaming and people are watching games on Twitter. Fantasy football has eroded interest in any one game.

Fans have been sensitized to the dangers of head trauma in the hits they used to love. How about the Cubs' World Series run? Then there's resentment of league leaders' arbitrary and capricious actions.

There are more, but you get the idea.

Some of this is the inevitable result of changes in technology and consumer preferences, "a real shift in how the people want to consume the media," Goodell said.

Notably, the Olympics, another long-reliable TV draw, also took a ratings hit last summer.

But that doesn't explain all of the lost NFL viewership.

ESPN play-by-play man Sean McDonough offered his own prognosis midway through the third quarter of an otherwise forgettable "Monday Night Football" game last month between the Cardinals and Jets after the officiating crew threw its umpteenth flag of the night.

"If we're looking for reasons why TV ratings for the NFL are down all over the place, this doesn't help," McDonough told viewers and, effectively, the league office. "The way this game has been officiated is not something anybody wants to watch."

The Cubs not only beat the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Thursday night, they clobbered the Bears on television here in Chicago.

Refreshed: The Bears emerged from their open date a recharged and more complete group. By week's end, only one player — rookie cornerback Deiondre' Hall — did not participate in practice. That should help get the depth chart closer to its intended alignment entering the second half...

But the league is looking at ways to pick up the pace of games, which get bogged down with replay reviews, commercial breaks and other distractions from the action fans want to see.

"Should the games be shorter?" Goodell said. "We've been focused on this for several years. We obviously want to take as much of what we call dead time, nonaction, out of the game so that we can make the game more exciting."

There were signs of trouble for the NFL even before the regular season started. Twenty-six of the league's 32 teams had declines in their local preseason TV ratings, according to Sports Business Daily. It reported the Bears saw their average on WFLD-Ch. 32 drop almost 40 percent from 2015.

Whether the Bears were victims of a trend or catalysts is open to debate. But their Halloween victory at Soldier Field over the Vikings was the lowest-rated Week 8 edition of "Monday Night Football" since ESPN began carrying the franchise a decade ago.

The Bears' Thursday night loss to the Packers 11 nights earlier — hurt, particularly in Chicago, by having to vie for viewers with a Cubs playoff game — attracted ratings roughly 18 percent lower than both a Seahawks-49ers game in that slot in 2015 and Jets-Patriots in 2014.

Ratings for the Bears' "Sunday Night Football" loss to the Cowboys? Down 7 percent down from NBC's Week 3 Lions-Broncos matchup the year before. The Bears' loss to the Eagles on ESPN? The lowest-rated Week 2 number for "Monday Night Football" in recent years.

"If we don't keep an open mind about preserving some flexibility, any measure of success you have can go away pretty quickly," Brian Rolapp of NFL Media and NFL Network's president and CEO said a day earlier at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting.

"We look constantly at improving the rules of the game, the safety of the game and the quality of the game," Rolapp said, according to Broadcasting & Cable, "even if that means changing things that some people think are sacred cows."

Whether that means paring back the league's lucrative expansion to Thursday nights, a third weekly prime-time slot, in the name of avoiding market saturation or simply shortening a fourth-quarter TV timeout remains to be seen.

But as it attempts to bounce back with viewers after the election, the NFL may find people demand change.